


The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by MJ (mjr91)



Category: Hannibal (TV), The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bedelia doesn't care, Bedelia knows, Doctors & Physicians, Gen, Hannibal is Hannibal, Mulder has issues, POV Dana Scully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:54:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bedelia du Maurier's reflections during a flight.  Will diverge from canon once S3 of Hannibal starts, obviously.  Completely diverges from the ending of X-Files but those last two seasons were pretty much on crack anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unbearable Lightness of Being

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RembrandtsWife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RembrandtsWife/gifts), [JiM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiM/gifts).



> Mommybird's gift to JiM and me reminded me of why I love X-Fic. I have another crossover in mind, involving (because I love Mommybird) Phil Coulson, but this bit me tonight. Sudden inspiration thanks to IfMuldercouldseemenow.

She's free now, or so she'd thought. She'd left the FBI, as had Fox Mulder; while he had gone on to make his fortune among the tin-foil helmet brigade – knowingly, worse yet, having found himself the real-life "he was there" go-to for the craziest of the conspiracy theorists and taking them to the bank with a cynicism born of too many years of rejection from the people he'd tried to convince, the ones who could really do something. She'd changed her name when she turned in her badge, gone back to medicine, spent a year back in medical school re-qualifying for a different specialty. She'd done enough possibly-alien autopsies, seen enough earthly mutations, hit her head against enough walls. There was one thing she'd learned first-hand, from the field, from dealing with Mulder and his friends, and that was front-line psychiatric treatment. Qualifying in it was nothing next to fielding psychic children and alien-possessed adults.  
  
She wasn't the only doctor who'd re-qualified in psychiatry rather than a more hands-on original specialty. She met everyone from urologists to pathologists, and then the occasional surgeon who'd lost either his nerve or his hands. Hopkins was a prestige school, and a loan along with money the Bureau had paid her to avoid following Mulder into talking rather than silence, made the re-qualifying training affordable.  
  
Among her classmates was one of the most interesting people she'd ever met who wasn't Fox Mulder. He was, in short, everything Fox Mulder wasn't. Broad-shouldered, level-headed, quiet and contemplative, artistic. One of the surgeons who'd gone weak for one reason or another; in his case, failure to save enough lives in the emergency room. He came from money – he was fabulously tailored, fabulously educated before college, with multiple languages at his disposal, and while he wasn't a religious man, he spoke the language that Bedelia du Maurier knew from her childhood, could use the words of the Church in a way that made her feel comfortable.  
  
They'd become friends, studying together, and he'd often let her stay overnight at his enormous, lavish home – how much money had he inherited? He'd spoken of family estates in Europe – and cooked for her, so that early exams and morning practicals didn't require mad dashes back to Georgetown for the night and traffic-filled commutes back to Baltimore in the early morning. But he'd never made a pass at her; was Hannibal Lecter simply an old-world gentleman, as her mother, Maggie, insisted, or was he perhaps gay? She didn't care – she'd harbored varying suspicions about Mulder, none of which had ever bothered her, but she wished she knew the right thing to think, the right thing to say. It occurred to her that Hannibal enjoyed leaving people in doubt about him and about his almost infinite charm.  
  
She'd taken the money her father had left her and bought a home in Baltimore County, where real estate was far cheaper than in the Washington area. Hannibal had helped her find the house, and had praised it despite its modernity, its total dissimilarity from his own Victorian mansion in the city. And still he had never done more than kissed her cheek and brought her elaborate dinners when she chose to stay in her home.  
  
But then – oh yes, then – he'd paid her the ultimate compliment. He did not become her lover. Instead, he became her patient. He had issues, so many of them, and she, Bedelia du Maurier, was the one psychiatrist he trusted. He knew she could see through him – he knew her past; they'd shared many confessions, and she knew about Misha, she knew exactly what had happened to his sister, and she knew that Hannibal Lecter could kill if he wanted to. He knew that she could kill as well, and that she had, and that she'd stared down the same kind of dark tunnels he'd known himself, even if the beings at the other end of the tunnel were different monsters from the men he'd known as a boy.  
  
He knew that Bedelia du Maurier might be beautiful, and that she might look delicate, but that underneath that was a core of steel rivaling his own. Hannibal Lecter knew that Bedelia du Maurier was the one other psychiatrist whom he might respect. Her past was in many ways as dark as his own, and she, also, had survived. She was also undeniably brilliant, just as he was. He could have any woman – or man - he wanted, but to find a therapist who could handle him? That was a one in a million chance, and it was named Bedelia du Maurier.  
  
The patient who'd tried to kill her? One of Hannibal's former clients. Had Hannibal set him on her? She thought he had, but as a test of her strength. She was, after all, still here – shaken, but not broken. Hannibal Lecter's worst nightmare patients were little more or less than she had seen and handled when she'd been assigned to the X-Files.  
  
And now Hannibal himself had done his worst, and she was on a trans-atlantic flight, in first class, with him, fleeing Baltimore as she'd once fled the Bureau. She was a chameleon, though, and she'd changed her identity before. Just as she knew what Hannibal Lecter was, he knew what she was. He might be more homicidal than Fox Mulder, but she understood him as she did the other. And Hannibal knew that she understood. They could make this journey together, and for all that she appeared to others captive to Hannibal's folly, she was indeed free. She'd shed her skin again, and there was such lightness in leaving it all behind to see what Hannibal would do next.  
  
She couldn't go where Mulder had gone. His tabloid-worthy, cynical telling of his truths, such a change in him, repulsed her. But Hannibal Lecter was, after Mulder, easily the most interesting man she'd ever known. His insanity was of a form she found more complex, yet easier to handle, than Mulder's. She was all but retired, and Hannibal her last remaining patient; more amusing to take her money and to walk into the unknown, to meet danger, with this friend than to remain in Baltimore alone, avoiding the wreckage of her former friend.  
  
The champagne from the fight attendant sealed it. Perhaps the police might think she'd been abducted, who knew. But Dana Scully was finally, if incomprehensibly to anyone else, celebrating life.


End file.
